Why do three buses always come along at once? This game explains.

The old joke that you wait ages for one bus, then three come along at once, is bordering on cliché. But it’s also, as it turns out, true – not just because of bad planning, but also because of maths.

The phenomenon is so common, in fact, that it has a choice of names. Bus bunching, clumping, convoying, platooning – all relate to the depressing reality that, over any length of time, buses serving a single route are likely to end up tootling along directly behind each other.

The reasons why this should be can be difficult to get your head around – so Lewis Lehe, a postgrad working on a PhD in transport engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has built a game of sorts to demonstrate. You can play it here. But if, like us, you are both lazy and impatient, here’s how it works, with a few helpful screenshots to illustrate.

The game features two buses, serving a circular route with four stops. At the start of the game, the two buses are evenly spaced, at opposing ends of the loop. Passenger flows at each stop are identical to those opposite: when one bus has to pause for a set period at one stop, the other is pausing for the same length of time across the map.